“Dopey Jack,” quoted Murtha in disgusted
tones. “That’s the way it is nowadays.
Give a dog a bad name—­why,—­I
suppose this bad name’s going to stick to him
all his life, now. It ain’t right.
You know, Carton, as well as I do that if they charged
him with just plain fighting and got him before a
jury, all you would have to say would be, ’Gentlemen,
the defendant at the bar is the notorious gangster,
Dopey Jack.’ And the jurors wouldn’t
wait to hear any more, but’d say, ‘Guilty!’
just like that. And he’d go up the river
for the top term. That’s what a boy like
that gets once the papers give him such an awful reputation.
It’s fierce!”

Carton shook his head. “Oh, Murtha,”
he remonstrated with just a twinkle in his eye, “you
don’t think I believe that sort of soft stuff,
do you? I’ve had my eye on this ’boy’—­he’s
twenty-eight, by the way—­too long.
You needn’t tell me anything about his respectable
old father and his sorrowing mother and weeping sister.
Murtha, I’ve been in this business too long for
that heart throb stuff. Leave that to the lawyers
the System will hire for him. Let’s cut
that out, between ourselves, and get down to brass
tacks.”

It was a new and awkward role for Murtha as suppliant,
and he evidently did not relish it. Aside from
his own interest in Dopey Jack, who was one of his
indispensables, it was apparent that he came as an
emissary from Dorgan himself to spy out the land and
perhaps reach some kind of understanding.

He glanced about at us, with a look that broadly hinted
that he would prefer to see Carton alone. Carton
made no move to ask us to leave and Kennedy met the
boss’s look calmly. Murtha smothered his
rage, although I knew he would with pleasure have had
us stuck up or blackjacked.

“See here, Carton.” he blurted out at
length, approaching the desk of the District Attorney
and lowering his big voice as much as he was capable,
“can’t we reach some kind of agreement
between ourselves? You let up on Rubano—­and—­well,
I might be able to get some of my friends to let up
on Carton. See?”

He was conveying as guardedly as he could a proposal
that if the District Attorney would consent to turn
his back while the law stumbled in one of the numerous
pitfalls that beset a criminal prosecution, the organization
would deliver the goods, quietly pass the word along
to knife its own man and allow Carton to be re-elected.

I studied Carton’s face intently. To a
man of another stripe, the proposal might have been
alluring. It meant that although the organization
ticket won, he would, in the public eye at least,
have the credit of beating the System, of going into
office unhampered, of having assured beyond doubt
what was at best only problematical with the Reform
League.